[Forum] vB cron based scheduled downtime?

[patracy]

Is there a means without a plugin/hack to setup a nightly downtime for a forum?

[Mark.B]

No, there's function to do this.

[William Thomas Jr]

I haven't looked into it at depth. Are you asking whether you can create a maintenance page, redirecting all request or traffic to that page during a scheduled cron job?

I asked my host about this (Siteground) and they said:

You will be able to edit your cron job script so index.html (maintenance page) can be created in the beginning of and displayed during the script execution.
In the end of the script you should remove the index.html file from the document root of your domain.
The index.html file will take precedence over the index.php file and the index.html will be displayed.

So I guess it is possible. I haven't ran into any issues yet but I think I'll look into it for the future. I would have to contact a professional to accomplish this, so if you end up finding a solution I would appreciate a follow-up post.

As is now I run multiple cron jobs to back up the site throughout a 24 hour day. This isn't an issue for me at the moment because the database isn't large.

William